Re: Informix 7.1 Pricing

Naomi Walker (naomi@anasazi.com) wrote: : I don't want this to be a slamming ground for Informix, but i'm interested : in your comments. : We are a large Informix shop, including being a VAR for their products. : While we are probably fairly small in Informix' eyes, we have given them : plenty of money over the years. We are currently running 4.1 Online and : a pile of their other tools on several machines (mostly Pyramid : hardware). Currently, we are looking at getting 7.1 Online in house, : and are stunned and hugely affected their new pricing structure. : My question to you all is how does the new user based pricing affect you, : and what comments do you have on the issue. Informix claims the majority : of people out their are happy as clams. To be fair, I am aware that Oracle : has a similar pricing structure. : Email responses are fine for me, since i'm more just curious, than wanting : to flame Informix, but whatever you'd like to share is fine with me. I was just about to post this message myself. We just looked into upgrading our SCO-Unix Informix Online 5.xx to 7.1 for the main reason of trying to find a stable platform. After declaring our user count at 40 our maintenance fee would jump to around $19,000/yr from $6,000/yr. This is mainly because we have an all development license. In reality we only have two developers and the rest are end-users. Unfortunately we were not able to split our license on one engine between runtime and development (to the best of my knowledge). So now suddenly we are looking at paying huge fees for maintenance on a development license that we are barely using for development. At present Informix is unwilling to "trade-down" part of our license to run-time. They are willing to sell us $40,000 worth of NEW run-time licenses which would fix our problem. :-O ..but that's half our entire computing budget. Anyway...I hope to convince them to let us "adjust" our license to what we are actually using, then the pricing for maintenance won't change much. Any guesses on the luck I'll have??? Any advice?? Maybe we'll end up throwing away our Online and buying a 40-user SE instead. --- and just when we were actually going to start using BLOBs too yet. :-( -- Dale Van Voorst voorst@dordt.edu Computer Services postmaster@dordt.edu Dordt College Sioux Center, IA 51250 (712) 722-6299